Patagonia Update (part 2)

[Note: I changed the placement of the pictures so that the newest ones appear at the end of the blog post]

It's always exciting to cross the border into a new country, and I'd heard lots of great things about Argentina. I arrived in a small, but lovely town on the border called Los Antiguos. Yet another example of less being more, I found myself walking down roads with rows of giant poplar trees on either side. Behind them were cozy family homes where you could buy cherries and jam they'd grown and produced. In the place where I stayed, I met an Israeli guy named Dror who I'd hang out with until we both caught the same bus the following day to El Chalten. It's worth mentioning that this bus was different from others I've taken. Instead of still being mostly populated by locals, it was full of nothing but young backpackers. Someone got out a guitar, and we tried to find songs to sing that we all knew. This was interesting because we were all from different places around the world. Sometimes the one's we'd find in common would be in English, othertimes not. I also had some very interesting conversations with some of them. As I've been fond of saying recently, travelling to South America is more than just a South American cultural experience.

With about 800 inhabitants, and maybe hundreds of thousands of visitors per year, El Chalten is a whopper of a tourist destination. Like everybody else, I'd come to trek in the Fitz Roy mountains. I wouldn't be alone this time, however, as Dror and I had decided to do a 2-day trek together; additionally, we'd be joined for the first day by three Israeli girls we'd met. We made all the preparations and far too many ham and cheese sandwiches, and the next day we got up and went. Although this trek would go a lot more smoothly than the last one, I think I actually enjoyed Cerro Castillo more. It's hard to feel like you're out experiencing nature when you're running into a crowd of people going the opposite direction every 2 minutes, when they're stopping you to see if you can help them with their game of 20 questions, or when there are 200 people cramped into your camp. The scenery was still sublime, though, and I'd enjoyed the company of my new Israeli friends. After we got back, Dror and I travelled onward to El Calafate to see the Perito Moreno glacier.

Let me just get it out of the way and say that the glacier was incredible, and that even though I'm going to put a picture up, you had to be there. I went with a couple who rented a car, and it was an exercise in communication since neither of them could speak English or Spanish very well. I can pretty much have a proper Spanish conversation now with anyone, but sometimes you still find situations like these. And you still manage. It's cool.

Another thing that was cool was that I met a couple of musicians from Buenos Aires who put on a concert for our hostel. I love live music, and especially in that kind of a setting, because you can really witness their inspiration. More than that, you can feel it, because you're getting inspired by it yourself. And it was personal, because I'd met them. I'd talked with them. I'd ate with them. Music is something to share, like so many other things, and you come to appreciate those things when you meet people from different cultures. I also like that when you're travelling around and meeting other travellers you know that they will gladly open their homes for you when you travel to their town. And vice versa. I tell my travelling friends that they're going to have to visit me if they come to Seattle. And some of them probably will.

After Calafate, I'd get on a bus for Puerto Natales, Chile to prepare for a world famous trek in the national park Torres del Paine. This one would be bigger and badder than the last two, and I was a bit nervous about finding a group because I really wanted to have one for what would be a 5-day backpacking trip. Of course, I needn't have worried. I worked out a plan to go to an informational talk about the trek and find people to go with there. The plan worked fine. I met a couple of guys from Wales, Caio and Tom, and we agreed to go on the trek together. After the talk, we started renting gear and buying food and making preparations to leave the next morning. This would be the trek where I'd really start to like trekking - the preparations, the feelings of adventure, companionship and self-sufficiency, the cooking, the camptime, the side-trips, getting warm when you're cold, and of course the shower and steak dinner waiting at the end of the road. And I guess after that, the photos and the blog update you create for your family and friends.

Getting to the starting point involved first a bus, then a catamaran. We then set off on what was day 1 of the trek towards a massive glacier called Glacier Grey. Our packs were heavy, because they were carrying all of the food we'd need for the entire 5 days, so we moved slowly. I mentioned side-trips earlier. Once we started getting near Glacier Grey, we went on the first one of them: iceberg hopping! We hadn't planned on it, but when we saw a 10 minute trail leading to a viewpoint for the glacier we dropped our packs and decided to go check it out. Well we could see the glacier looming nearby, but we also saw a large field of icebergs in a lake with some Chilean guys standing on them. That was more interesting. We went down towards them, and Caio was the first one to test out their idea. He tried putting some weight on a smaller iceberg near the shore, and found that it sunk slowly. He jumped from that one onto a larger one which was solid. Tom and I reluctantly stepped out onto them as well. The stakes were obvious - if you fell in the water, you'd have a bit of a situation involving getting real cold real fast. The icebergs were slippery, and so we had to be very cautious. It added to the fun of it, though, and everything about it was fresh and new. I had a blast, and we took pictures.

It would be topped by the side-trip of day 2. Before we embarked on the trek, we'd heard someone mention ice caves down by the glacier, and our interest had been perked since that point. We found a trail leading down to the glacier where there were some rivers flowing towards it as well. Climbing down, we found the caves. I've never seen anything like them. From the outside looking in, the first thing that is astonishing about them is the color; a blue like what would come from an electric blue light, but a natural one. The caves emit this blue like an other-worldly glow, and when you step inside you find yourself surrounded by it. You enter into a space with a mountain of ice surrounding it, and the space continues deep into that mountain. Their are unusual formations in the ice, and it's dripping on you. You can hear, sense, the mountain moving, living. It was accutely uncomfortable. Caio and I went in so far as we could see another passageway branching off deeply into what seemed to be a vast labryinth underneath the glacier before turning back. It was one of the most amazing things I've seen, but we couldn't stay. We didn't want to get eaten by a glacier. Another side-trip on the way back would have us hiking towards a big waterfall. We found ourselves above it looking down into a rainbow. Pretty cool.

Day 3 was rainy. We tried to hike up a hill to see a valley, but only saw fog. After that, the slow march to our next camp was a bit drab. We were cold and wet, and the trails were muddy and sometimes more like rivers than trails. This motivated us to cheat a bit when we got there and a few comforts were available to us. Right next to our camp was a refugio - a place that was heated and had hot showers. We'd still use our tents that night, but we took the warmth and we took the showers, and that was all quite revitalizing. Beyond just Caio and Tom and I, we'd become part of a wider circle of folks all heading the same direction on the trail who would hang out together at camp. It was nice to just sit there together, eat, and talk in that warm lodge.

The next day was thankfully sunny and nice. We had a fairly straightforward hike towards the next camp, which would put us in striking distance of the Torres (or 'towers') for which the park is named. The goal was to get up very early the following day, and get up to the Torres for sunrise, before trekking out of the mountains to the place where a bus would take us out of the park. Along the way, as had been the case for the whole trip, we saw some amazing scenery, and an extra treat: condors. These large birds of prey fly so effortlessly and gracefully through the air that you can't help but be mesmorized by them. Once we got to camp, we had a bit of a party to celebrate our last night in the park - this involved funk music and boxed wine.

You really don't feel like getting up at 4:30 in the morning after 4 days of trekking; not to mention after a night of funk music and boxed wine. But we did it, strapped on headlamps, and started up the mountain over a field of boulders. We brought stoves to prepare hot tea, and sleeping bags and mats to keep us warm. Scrambling over rocks, the cold propelled us to the top, and once we got up there we bundled up, made some tea, and waited for the sun. The Torres loomed in the fog before us like something out of a nightmare. The initial sunrise washed the sky opposite them with brilliant colors, and then began to light them up. This was what we were waiting for, and it was really quite a sight to see. Once it seemed like the show might be over, after the sun had fully appeared and the color brought by it's newness had diminished, a rainbow full and bright came up over the Torres. While we were marveling at that, a couple out of the group we'd been spending time with at camp came down and announced that they'd just gotten engaged.

As we made our way back down and out of the park, we were tired but satisfied. I couldn't have imagined a more perfect finale to the trip. That night we'd all be eating dinner together in a restaurant in Puerto Natales.

And so it is for the traveller, that in a short time like this he's drawn closely to the people around him by the intensity and isolation of his experiences. And afterwards, he goes on his way; alone, and thinking longingly of home. One thing I hope for when I get there, is that we never forget to take time for each other. It's really more important than anything else.

Tomorrow I'm getting on a bus for Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world. I'm going to the end of the earth, and then I'm coming back.

God Bless,
Stephen